


Broken Shards

by Yuletide (Zebra)



Category: Tron (1982)
Genre: Gen, Set some time after the movie
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-17
Updated: 2019-12-17
Packaged: 2021-02-26 05:34:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,618
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21838303
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zebra/pseuds/Yuletide
Summary: Lora's latest visit to the digital domain doesn't go as smooth as planed.
Relationships: Lora Baines & Yori
Comments: 3
Kudos: 8
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	Broken Shards

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Allronix](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Allronix/gifts).



The transfer should have been smooth.

A dizzying array of colors and shapes, yes. But not what Lora could only describe as a ride through broken shards. For the first time she was afraid of the trip.

And then she was through, falling hard onto the floor.

“Come! We have to leave. It’s not save here.”

Yori grabbed her arm hard and dragged her along, barely even letting her find her footing.

She didn’t have time to look around while they were running, but the light was all wrong. It seemed like some kind of fog was obscuring the usually crisp and harsh lights of the digital domain.

Lora had trouble remaining on her feet, the path was uneven and Yori went around corners at random intervals. She was breathing hard, about to beg for a rest when Yori stopped them and they hunkered down in a nook between two tall and solid walls.

“What happened? What’s going on?”

Yori kept Laura behind her, kept nervously looking out of their little hiding place.

“There’s a virus. It came via one of the floppy drives.”

“Shouldn’t Tron prevent that?”

“I’m sure he would have, if it had come via the network ports. As it is we took ours down to prevent that virus from escaping. Someone will eventually notice when they can’t ping us, but who knows what will have happened to us till then.”

A virus. Lora didn’t think this was an accident. Everybody who worked at the lab had had it harped into them to never connect anything to the digitizing laser that wasn’t check at the digital security station.

The digital security station was not manned by Tron, someone else had written that program. But Tron could deal with viruses as part of his access protection function. He and Asp commonly exchanged virus and other malware signatures. Alan had shown her some of the funnier viruses Asp had caught. But this was no harmless program using the external floppy drives to play music.

Lora was sure that this was a deliberate attack. Someone was after their research of the digitizer. Flynn, Alan and Lora had kept quiet about the digital domain, but they had had to release some of the successes they had with the digitizer. Just being able to digitize an apple, getting it back safely and turning into an apple pie had been a major break through. They were on the cusp of sending the digitized data from one place to another. As a matter of the fact, the second laser at one of ENCOM’s other offices had just been finished earlier today and the first transporter experiment had been scheduled for next week.

They had to prevent that virus from escaping the system, and they had to draw outside attention to themselves.

“Yori, can you still send me back? I can alert Alan.”

Yori turned towards her.

“I’m not sure, the virus already got several of the support routines. I don’t know whether I alone am enough.”

There was what sounded like splintering glass and Yori flinched.

“But I do not think that someone will help us in time. We have to try to send you back, you might die in the digitizer, but you’ll be derezzed here.”

Yori was evading her eyes, not looking whether they were save to leave there nook, evading her eyes.

“What is it? What aren’t you telling me?”

They were locking eyes then.

“What happens if the virus gets you? You are Yori-1. You have absolute access rights to the digitizer...” “What happens if this virus escapes into my world.”

She understood now. They could not allow that under any circumstances. The digital domain was prepared to deal with a virus, one way or another. There was no saying whether her world could do the same. The digitizer might not be able to re-digitize data that had never existed outside the digital domain, or it might re-digitize something beyond their wildest imaginations.

“If you can’t send me back, you’ll have to prevent that thing from escaping this system.”

She squeezed Yori’s shoulder. They would do it.

Yori took her hand and squeezed back.

“Lets go. With you here, I can do it.”

While Yori didn’t see Lora quite as godlike as Tron saw Alan, neither of the two programs had ever quite lost their absolute trust in the Users. Not even after several months of Flynn bumbling about. Flynn had been instrumental in defeating the MCP after all. Which meant that even if he fumbled about and confused them with talk about sandwiches and apple trees, they still thought in their world a User could do everything.

Their way back wasn’t the same they had come, it was more difficult, the path even more broken. Lora couldn’t see the virus itself, only glimpsing the shadows of what appeared to be many giant tentacles in the fog.

A fog that – as they had to pass it far too close for Lora’s comfort – turned out to be made of countless of little shards. Shards of the splintered digital domain and its inhabitants. Lora was hard pressed not to shudder in revulsion at all these little pieces of what had once been a living world.

They arrived at the digitizer portal. A sharp crack already visible in its side, the fog pressing against it.

They ran and passed the entrance just a short moment before something enormous hit the portal structure where they had just been,

The walls still stood, but it wouldn’t do so for long. Yori immediately went to her station, working on setting up the re-digitizing protocols.

Meanwhile Lora used one of the auxiliary stations to replace some of the lost support functions. It was something that had seemed rather surprising to her when she had first arrived. While they weren’t gods, a User’s possibilities quite exceeded what any program could do. It was for her to not only replace three of the minor supports, but also two of the major ones.

Before them the digitizer platform glowed. Waiting for her to enter, a look quite different from the menacing machine on her side of the system, this side it looked like just another IO port.

Yori came to stand beside her. The once steady portal stream was flickering.

Hand in hand they went up to the platform, drawing strength from each other. A User and her Program. They would get through this together or not at all.

Just in that moment the wall fell under the onslaught. Lora could only stare in horror as the tentacle made of myriads of little shards flying at them.

Yori recovered quicker and pushed Lora into the stream. She tried to hold on, tried to take Yori with here. They had never tried, but maybe the digitizer would let her through, would let both of them escape from that inescapable monster. But Yori ripped herself free and the last thing Lora saw was how she ran at the tentacle.

The journey back was smoother than the journey in, it felt almost normal. And while it felt like an eternity to Lora, it surely took exactly as long as it had always taken for her to materialize in the digitizing cage.

The laser was humming, she could hear that it was powering up even more. The electric whine of overtaxed power supplies almost too much to bear. 

Lora had no time to think, she could only react. Doing what everybody knew to do but nobody ever got to practice, because the systems where just too fragile.

Lora hit the emergency shutdown button. With a loud bang the whole lab was plunged in darkness, except for one corner where something exploded in a shower of sparks. It was far enough away that it wouldn’t be anything irreplaceable, but the sudden silence was all too loud in announcing that not only the main power had been lost but the uninterruptible power supply to tide the systems over for a time had been turned off as well.

The emergency lights cast everything in an eerie, sinister light. Lora’s world was safe, but who could say what state Yori’s was in. Any powering up the system would have to been done carefully. Not only was the virus still a very real threat to at least this system, which of course would be disconnected from the network and the laser till it was deemed save again, but there was also the danger of dataloss. While it was not uncommon to lose a power supply that didn’t take well to cooling down when not left running all the time, the real danger lay in the permanent storage. Everything in the main memory would have been lost when the last charges of energy were used up, but the real danger to the permanent storage lay in an overcharge spikes which could scramble its memory. An overcharge spike that could easily be induced by a sudden shut down.

Lora sank to the floor next to her station. She could hear the alarms ringing in the distance. Soon someone would be here. Soon they’d get to work on recovering what could be recovered. On replacing and patching what was lost.

Lora would gladly lose all her work on the digitizer, if only Yori will have made it. 

After having met her program, she wasn’t sure she would be able to do it again. To bring another being like her into the world. 

Lora closed her eyes and waited in the darkness, the emergency light glittering like broken shards on glossy surfaces around her.

* * *

_unarchive Yori.backup19_  
 _check_integrity Yori.backup19_  
 **INTEGRITY CHECK – PASS**  
 _start Yori.backup19_  
 **PROGRAM START COMPLETE**  
Hello Lora-1!


End file.
